of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate
revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground
shine.

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and
partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountain
slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the
view by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest
things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the
sun.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries
than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence it
writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils
of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it
sheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the
hills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Its
own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It is
always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works
and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the painted
surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise
light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate
gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some
little landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavy
with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;
and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always